Greg's Real Love Blog

Accompany me on a journey and a fantasy. We’re going by foot, and initially the walk is pleasant and easy. We’re walking on flat terrain with soft grass under our feet.

Gradually, however, the ground begins to rise, making it a little harder to walk, and the soft grass disappears, replaced by hard-packed dirt and an increasing number of rocks that sometimes we can avoid and at others times must simply walk on. The wind begins to blow, at first gently now and again, but gradually with greater velocity and consistency, and always in our faces, making our progress steadily more difficult.

This is the fantasy part. As you walk, I tell you that each time you raise your arms such that your palms face the wind, you’ll grow wings. That’s an irresistible notion, so you try it, and sure enough, the first time you raise your arms you experience a tingling sensation accompanied by the slightest broadening of your arms and the appearance of a tiny growth of down on your fingers. Encouraged, you try it again, and the growth continues. This is fascinating to watch, but at this point your wings haven’t fully developed, so with each bit of growth, your arms only become wider and a bit more feathered, which causes them to catch more of the wind and make it considerably more difficult for you to walk or hold your arms up. Your arms are increasing your resistance to the wind and making your life harder.

So, understandably, you quit raising your arms and continue walking up the slope, whose incline gradually increases. The rocks become larger too, so you must alternate between vigorous walking and climbing up and around the rocks. Periodically you raise your arms to the wind, but it’s becoming harder and harder to do that.

It seems that the path is becoming impossibly difficult, but still you press on, and still you keep raising your arms, even though at times it seems that the wind is blowing you backward faster than you can press forward. Finally, standing on top of a boulder that is blocking your path, you raise your arms in frustration, screaming at the sky. At that moment, you are lifted entirely off the rock, off the mountain, and high into the sky. Now you can see it all: the mountain; the ranges of other mountains; the valley where you began your journey; lakes, rivers, and plains as far as the eye can see, sights that were invisible to you while climbing on the path in the shadow of the single mountain and the boulders where you were climbing.

For such a long time you resented the weight and the increased resistance created by the growing wings. They seemed like nothing but a burden, but you persisted until the day your wings matured into the aerodynamic miracles that wings were meant to be. And then the resistance disappeared. More than that, your wings became the means by which you could move to another plane entirely, a power by which everything you had done previously was made to look ponderous and slow by comparison.

And so it is in our daily lives. We persist in slowly plodding up the same paths, day after day, with the way seeming to become more difficult all the time. And then we learn about Real Love, a way to fly instead of crawling on the ground. But it takes time to develop these wings, and sometimes in the beginning they actually seem to make things harder. But if we persist, motivated in part by remembering that without wings the way will always be miserable and endless, our wings continue to grow. And just when we think they’ll never help us, we raise our arms and lift into the sky. Like eagles we rise on our wings, leaving behind us all our weariness, and oh, what a feeling! Oh, what a reward for all the sacrifices and the waiting.

Saddam Hussein has just been condemned in an Iraqi court to be executed for the crimes he has against his own people. Hussein has been characterized, among other things, as a

• murderer.
• tyrant.
• despot.
• psychopath.
• genocidal maniac.
• madman.
• monster.

Although we have ample justification for applying these labels, each of them can also become a self-deceptive and harmful dead end in our search for a genuine understanding of Hussein, of ourselves, and of human behavior as a whole. Allow me to illustrate what I mean with a discussion of just one of these terms: monster.

Imagine that you and I have a conversation where your behavior toward me is undeniably critical and angry. Hours later, when I’m reviewing in my mind what happened between us, I decide that you were unkind, mean-spirited, and singularly abominable. I conclude, in fact, that you were a jerk, even a monster.

Is my characterization of you justifiable? In some ways, perhaps. My reasoning—almost always carried out unconsciously—might go as follows:

• In order to be happy what we all need most is Real Love, as explained in http://www.reallove.com/about_real_love.asp Specifically, what I needed from you in our conversation was Real Love.
• When we’re angry at other people, we’re loudly communicating that our needs aren’t being met. Anger is an obvious indication that we’re focusing on ourselves, and in that moment we couldn’t possibly have a primary interest in the happiness of others. In short, as explained in http://www.reallove.com/anger_management.asp , the message we convey with anger is I don’t love you. Specifically, when you were angry at me in our conversation, you were not loving me unconditionally, and I felt that.
• Because our need for Real Love is so great, telling people we don’t love them is the most hurtful thing we could do. It’s wounding. Specifically, you wounded me with your anger.
• The essential characteristic of monsters is that they hurt other people.
• Because you injured me—because you chose to hurt me instead of loving me—you qualify as a monster.

Labeling you a monster has some significant advantages:

• Clarity. When we don’t understand what’s really happening in a relationship, we feel lost and confused. We hate those feelings. And if we’re also in pain, confusion keeps us from seeing a way out of our pain, and that’s a terrible, hopeless sensation. If we can label another person the monster in a relationship, however, much of the confusion is then gone. Now at least we know why we’re in pain—or we think we do. Specifically, when I label you a monster, I don’t wonder anymore why our conversation was painful. Now I know that it’s your fault, and from that certainty I can derive a perverse sense of comfort.
• Morality. Once I’ve labeled you a monster, I can feel morally superior to you.
• Power. After I label you the monster, I can often enlist the aid of others who will then help me in my defense against you. People tend to rally around the banner of those who are unjustly persecuted. We love to rally together against monsters.

Although there are many advantages to labeling people monsters, the disadvantages are enormous. If I condemn you as a monster in the above conversation, for example, I

• miss out on a valuable opportunity to learn anything at all from the experience. Once I label you as the problem, I remove all motivation to examine my own behavior, and now I’m really stuck. If my own behavior doesn’t change, I will keep having the same miserable interactions with anyone who behaves like you did. Sure, I can keep blaming you and everyone else for my unhappiness, but I’ll still be unhappy, and that is a terrible price to pay.
• miss out on the opportunity to learn how to love you and thereby change both our lives.
• miss out on a golden opportunities to feel loved unconditionally that can be created only as I tell the truth about myself, not as I tell the truth about you or anyone else.

In this article we’ll be attempting to genuinely understand Hussein, rather than simply labeling and condemning him. Specifically, we’ll be examining how profoundly his life—and the lives of millions of others—was affected by his belief that he was a victim, which is one of the Getting and Protecting Behaviors, as explained at http://www.reallove.com/protect_behaviors.asp. Most important, by far, although this section on Hussein is fascinating both from a historical and psychological perspective, the true benefit to us—and a potentially enormous one at that—is the opportunity to understand ourselves.

In order to be happy, what we all need most is to feel loved, but not any kind of love will do. We must feel loved unconditionally. We must receive Real Love, as explained at http://www.reallove.com/about_real_love.asp . In the absence of sufficient Real Love, our pain is unbearable, and we respond by using Getting and Protecting Behaviors (http://www.reallove.com/protect_behaviors.asp) to get enough Imitation Love (http://www.reallove.com/about_real_love.asp ) in our lives. Regrettably, Imitation Love and Getting and Protecting Behaviors are guaranteed to bring us only misery.

As we study the lives of men who achieved singular notoriety—such as Hitler, Stalin, Saloth Sar (better known as Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge), Hussein—there is a natural tendency on our part to react by pursing our lips, sighing, shaking our heads, and responding with a self-righteous “Tsk, tsk.” While this reaction is understandable, if we give in to it we rob ourselves of an invaluable, indispensable opportunity to learn about ourselves, since we are all united by the same humanity, the same need for Real Love, the same emptiness and fear, the same addictions to Imitation Love, and the same use of Getting and Protecting Behaviors. Certainly these men used Imitation Love and Getting and Protecting Behaviors in more dramatic and more visible ways than most of us do, and their addictions affected the lives of more people than most of us ever will, but we are not so terribly different from them as we would like to suppose. They still have much to teach us about ourselves.

These men all began as we did, as small children who were wounded by the absence of that which they needed most. Unlike you and me, they rose to positions where their behaviors affected millions rather than a few. When I as a parent speak unkindly to a child, in that moment I inflict the same kind of wound that Hussein did upon millions. In a moment of anger I am telling that child that I don’t love him, and the damage done by that unkindness is not to be dismissed just because it pales in quantity with the actions of a man who was simply capable—by virtue of position and abilities and historical fate—of affecting a greater number of people.

As we read about Saddam Hussein in the light of our understanding of Real Love and victimhood, we create an opportunity to learn about our own victimhood:

• We can more easily see how we too act like victims and in our own ways cause our own kinds of destruction to spouses, lovers, children, friends, co-workers, and so on.
• We can better understand the vast numbers of other people around us who feel and act like victims.
• We can take giant strides toward replacing the fear and anger and pain in our lives with peace, love, and happiness. This reward alone should be enough to entice us to take steps in this new direction of understanding.

As I discuss the effects that victimhood has had on Saddam Hussein, keep in mind that

• I am not attempting to excuse anyone’s behavior. At no point—and in no way—am I saying, for example, “Poor Saddam, he was a victim, so he just couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t really his fault that he killed millions of people.”
• I am not proposing that there were no other factors that contributed to the behaviors of these people. In addition to acting like a victim, for example, Hussein and other infamous characters may also have been influenced by a psycho-affective disorder or paranoid personality. I am talking about the role of victimhood because historical records provide more certainty about this factor and because there is more we can do about this problem in our own lives. Let’s say, for example, that I could state with authority—which I cannot—that 37% of Hussein’s behavior was dictated by a well-defined psychiatric disorder, one which today could be marginally controlled with medication. And suppose we could say that 50% of his behavior originated from his belief that he was a victim. There is little reason to talk about the disorder for which there is only some hope of treatment at best, when we can talk about victimhood instead, which can be profoundly affected with understanding and with Real Love.

Most of the following data was gathered from Saddam Hussein, a Biography, by Shiva Balaghi, Greenwood Press, 2006.

Saddam Hussein’s father died before he was born, and his mother went to her brother’s home for the delivery of her child. He always regarded himself as a victim of his father’s loss, and in later life, as dictator of Iraq, he favored poets who referred to similarities between himself and the Prophet Muhammad, whose father had also died before he was born.

Shortly after Saddam was born, his mother re-married, and her new husband beat Saddam and called him a “son of a dog” and “son of a whore.” The stepfather also didn’t talk to Saddam much and certainly didn’t show him any affection. At a young age, therefore, Hussein had already been victimized severely, and he soon reacted to his pain by acting like a victim.

Saddam was raised in Tikrit, a very poor and harsh place, and at a young age he became what the Arabs called a “son of the alleys” or what we might call a hoodlum or young gangster. An old friend remembered that at an early age Saddam carried with him an iron bar to protect himself from stray dogs or other people, and he grew up believing that the only thing he could trust was that iron bar. This is how a victim sees the world, as something he must protect himself from constantly. When his friends gathered and talked about growing up to become doctors and poets, Saddam talked about having a jeep, a gun, and binoculars.

At age ten Saddam moved to his uncle’s house, where he received his education. His uncle had been intimately involved with the 1941 Iraqi rebellion against the British occupation of the country, and for his efforts he had spent five years in prison. He too felt thoroughly victimized, and he powerfully conveyed that attitude to his nephew. He once wrote a pamphlet, Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies. Saddam wrote of him, “He always inspired us with a great nationalistic feeling.” To Saddam nationalism meant a reaction to centuries of victimization by outsiders.

Saddam felt victimized personally, but he also lived in a country and in a household and in a culture where victimhood was preached daily as a form of patriotism. The Ottoman Turks had occupied Iraq for hundreds of years, and then in 1917 they were replaced by the British, who promised not to occupy the country. But the Brits stayed, and they installed as king a man who wasn’t even Iraqi, which really irritated his subjects. The Iraqis made many subsequent attempts to throw the British and their puppet leaders out, and on each occasion when they failed—with the increased political oppression that followed—it was regarded as another victimization of the country.

Hussein learned to read at a late age, and in school he intensely resented the authority of teachers. Once he even slipped a snake into the robe of a teacher while he was pretending to embrace the man. When Saddam was fourteen, one teacher gave him a beating, and one witness testified that later that night Saddam went to the teacher’s house and shot the first person to open the door, who happened to be the teacher’s brother. The man lived.

Saddam’s earliest political activities consisted of organizing street gangs in support of the Baath party. At age twenty-one he served six months in prison for murdering a local communist leader, and with every passing year his sense of personal and national injustice was building.

A year later Saddam was part of the assassination team that tried to kill the president of Iraq, and his escape from the country was both dramatic and well-used as propaganda material for many years afterward. In his absence he was sentenced to death, but he simply remained in Syria as an exile for four years. When Saddam returned to Iraq, he was soon involved in another plot to assassinate a new Iraqi president, and this time he was caught and put in prison.
In the space of ten years, four government coups took place in Iraq, so Saddam was part of a tumultuous political landscape where justification of extreme behavior came easily. In his early speeches, he talked about fighting imperialism and making his country a safe place for the Arab struggle. He saw the world in terms of himself and them, everyone that he must defend himself against.

“When I was a child,” Saddam Hussein once told a reporter, “a man walked through my village without carrying a weapon. An old man came up to him and said, ‘Why are you asking for trouble?’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ The old man replied, ‘By walking without a weapon, you are asking for people to attack you. Carry a weapon so that blood will not be spilled!’”

When Iraq’s president retired, Saddam succeeded him and summoned four hundred Baath party members to a televised meeting. There he announced that he had discovered a plot to overthrow the party, and he began to name traitors who were hauled away one by one, until one man stood to sing the praises of Saddam, at which point everyone joined in. Five hundred officials were later executed, not just at Hussein’s orders but in many cases at his personal hand. After the executions were complete, Saddam stood on the balcony of Presidential Palace in Baghdad and saluted a crowd of 50,000 who shouted, “Death to the Traitors!” All of this was right out of the Victim’s Handbook: a plot (against him), motivating the leaders to sing his praises, his personally exacting revenge for offenses against him, the crowd of 50,000 (to worship him), the chant “Death to the Traitors” (who betrayed him).

At one point Hussein became personally offended—as victims do—at the language of Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and in retaliation he launched the longest war of the twentieth century, which resulted in 1.5 million casualties.

After invading Kuwait, he said, “Arabs, Moslems, believers in God, this is your day to rise and spread quickly in order to defend Mecca, which is captive to the spears of the Americans and the Zionists . . . who want harm for your families.” Victims see harm everywhere, and they commit their atrocities in the name of defending themselves and others. He then changed the Iraqi flag, adding the words God is great written in his own hand in the middle of the banner. Victims have no limits to their self-centeredness. He referred to the battle with Western forces as “the great duel, the mother of all battles, between the victorious right and the evil that will certainly be defeated.”

As with all victims, Hussein was not concerned with the cost of his behavior to others. In 1989, Iraq’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was $2,840. By 1997—under his leadership—it had dropped to $200. His decisions to involve his country in wars to salve his sense of victimhood had nearly destroyed his entire country. But he didn’t let these conflicts affect his personal wealth. He was worth billions and lived in fifty palaces, just one of which was big as all of the District of Columbia.

Now Saddam has come to an ignominious end. He has been sentenced to death by an Iraqi court. Let us learn from his life. Let us learn that when we act like victims and lash out at others who have “hurt” us, we only cause more hurt—to others and to ourselves. The world doesn’t need more pain. It needs more love.

The whole goal of learning is to acquire information or skills that we didn’t have before and, hopefully, to use that information to make our lives happier.

By definition, as we learn our knowledge grows, so as we move along the road of learning it is absolutely unavoidable that we must at times make choices with imperfect knowledge, and with imperfect knowledge we cannot avoid making mistakes. In other words, in the process of learning, we are guaranteed to make mistakes. It is not possible to avoid them.

It’s ironic, then, that we generally paint mistakes with such a heavy brush of dishonor and shame. When other people make mistakes—especially if they affect us in a negative way—we almost uniformly make them feel guilty for daring to commit a “crime” against us. We require apologies and demand that people pay for their mistakes. When we make mistakes, we feel guilty and often shameful.

And we do all this over these mistakes that are an unavoidable part of the process of learning.

Recently I experienced a much better way of responding to mistakes. I borrowed a friend’s car, and in it I found a navigation device, which was capable of giving me directions to any place in the country. I was fascinated with this device. It actually spoke and told me how far I had to travel to the next turn, which direction to turn, which lane to get in, and so on.

At one point, I was inattentive and drove past the street where the device told me to turn. To my amazement, the device did not shout, “You idiot! The turn was back there. Are you stupid, or are you blind?” No, instead the device said, “Recalculating,” and then it gave me new directions to my destination, based on my new location. All was well in the world.

What an amazing lesson. People do not learn better when they’re yelled at. They don’t need to be told that they’re stupid. They don’t need to be beaten or made to feel guilty. When they make mistakes, they just need to see the mistakes and learn from them. Wouldn’t the world be different if every time someone made a mistake, we simply said, “Recalcuating?”

Ian Thorpe is a five-time Olympic gold medallist and eleven-time world champion in swimming, and today at the tender age of twenty-four he announced his retirement from his sport, at a time when his prospects for yet additional honors were excellent. Quoting from his press conference:“I started asking a lot of questions, and I started to look at myself, not just as swimmer, but as a person.What would my life be like without swimming? It's a very, very dark question for me because swimming has provided a safety blanket. It's been a security kind of net for me. When I'm not certain about developing other sides of my life, I just fall straight back into swimming. And what it's meant is I haven't balanced out my life as well as what I should . . . Swimming has provided that security.”This young man competed on the Australian national team at age fourteen, so he has bathed in the light of praise and power from a young age. After years of earning all the attention he’s received, he’s realized that something is missing. He may not realize yet exactly what he’s missing, but he illustrates nicely what all of us realize at some point in our lives: No amount of Imitation Love can ever fill up our emptiness.

The people who seek praise are always looking for the next moment of applause. Those who seek money as their source of fulfillment are constantly trying to make the next dollar. Those who revel in power can never get enough. The people who hope that sex will make them happy are in a continual search for their next pleasurable experience. And so it goes with all the forms of Imitation Love: shopping, gambling, entertainment, adrenalin, and so on.

Some people even switch from one form of Imitation Love to another, hoping that the change will prove satisfying. That’s what happens, for example, when men who have tried to find happiness in the praise and power they get from their careers suddenly have a mid-life crisis and run off with their secretaries. They come to the horrifying realization that what they’re doing will never make them happy, and they hope that a switch to pleasure might fill them up, but of course it never does.

One can only hope that young Ian Thorpe will find Real Love and won’t simply move to another form of Imitation Love. At least he has recognized at an early age that the pursuit of praise isn’t nearly as fulfilling as he once had hoped.

I have a large backyard filled with bushes, trees, a stream, a lake, and a variety of wildlife. Over the years, I’ve gradually minimized the labor required for upkeep of the place, but every month or so we still prune and gather quite a volume of sticks and branches, which we then burn in a large pile out near the lake.

The branches we gather are usually old and dry, so they burn fairly easily. This year, however, over a period of several months, we gathered an unusually large number of branches that were completely green—because they were freshly pruned rather than gathered—and we stacked them in large pile measuring about eight feet high, twenty-five feet long, and ten feet wide.

From long experience building fires, I’m quite aware that green wood burns poorly—if at all—because of its high water content, but one day I thought I’d make an attempt to set the pile on fire anyway. I knew this fire would require more help than usual, so I brought out the gasoline.

Making a fire with gas can be quite exciting, especially for us closet pyromaniacs. When you throw a quart of gas on a fire, it doesn’t just burn. It explodes. The single largest non-nuclear bomb used by the United States military, for example, is composed of gas. The flames, the heat, and even the concussion from a gas explosion are impressive. In a short period of time, I threw at least four gallons of gas on that fire, producing giant fireballs that erupted into the sky and delighted both me and my granddaughter, whom I kept far from the flames.

After all those dramatic flashes of heat, however, I still had no fire at all in the pile of branches. Nothing. The fire from the gas had simply scorched the outside of the green branches, and none of them had caught fire. I laughed at my foolishness, walked away from the pile, and let the fire go.

A week later I decided to try something else. I took an armload of seasoned oak out to the pile and built a fire right next to the pile of green branches. Although the oak fire was far less dramatic than the gas fire, it nonetheless burned hot and steadily, and I kept putting the green branches on top of the oak fire. After twenty minutes or so, the oak fire dried out enough of the green branches that they began to catch fire, in turn drying out other branches, and soon there was an enormous bonfire, with flames shooting fifty feet in the air. The fire was so hot we couldn’t walk within forty feet of it. Soon the entire pile was consumed.

My experiences with people have been similar to my experience with building those two fires. In recent years, we have introduced the principles of Real Love to hundreds of thousands of people, and initially the vast majority of them have felt the truth and power of the message. Real Love has affected most of them dramatically—like a hot, gasoline-fed fire—but that initial blast of heat alone has proven to be far less than enough to produce a genuine and lasting change for most of them.

Most people have been empty and afraid for so long that one experience with Real Love—no matter how powerful—is not sufficient to change a lifelong pattern of feelings and behaviors. These people are like green branches. The initial effect of Real Love produces a scorch on the outside, but it’s not enough to set them on fire. Many of them, understandably and regrettably, are looking for an instant miracle, and when they discover that changing the pattern of their lives requires more than a day or two, they lapse back into their old beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. The fire goes out.

Many other people, however, have the wisdom to recognize that changing the pattern of their lives will take more than a day or a week, so they follow the recommendations of the Real Love seminars and literature. They seek out those who are more experienced with Real Love, who have the ability to give it with some consistency. They seek out wise men and women who burn with a hot and steady flame—like the fire built from oak—and the longer they are around these men and women, the more they become seasoned and prepared to catch fire themselves.

We need each other. We need the steady, seasoning influence of those who can warm our hearts and burn away our emptiness and fears. The power of Real Love is not found in a brief flash of heat and excitement. Its power is found in the steady influence of those who accept and love us from day to day, often in quite undramatic ways.

Persist in your efforts to find these wise men and women. Warm your hands and hearts in the heat of their love. If you continue in your efforts, you will be richly rewarded. You will be transformed by their warmth. Without conscious effort, all those qualities that have impeded your happiness will be burned away, and in time you will become a source of light and warmth to others. When that day comes, make the heat of your fire available to as many others as possible. It’s a miraculous process and well worth all the effort we could ever put into it.